There’s another big consideration as well: Federal contracting law.
Republicans, if they were smart, would shift to questioning whether Federal contracting law and the FAR are being followed in trying to fix this disaster. My bet us that they aren’t, and the Administration is actively ignoring, bypassing and breaking the law in a desperate attempt to get this mess fixed.
To add: the threat of a major Congressional investigation into whether the FAR and other regs is being followed, now, as attempts are made to fix the system is going to have a HUGE impact as the contractors and government career Contracting Officers suddenly start following the letter of the law in spite of what their political overseers order them to do.
And President 404’s statement that the best and brightest are being parachuted in to help out just SCREAMS violation of security clearance and other onboarding requirements for getting someone EOD’d.
You make a good point about contracting to fix this disaster. Given the magnitude of the work and the fact that there are many qualified vendors that could do the remediation work, competition would normally be required. And there is NO WAY a real competition of this size and complexity could be done in less than a year’s time. Somebody is cutting corners in awarding this work despite FAR prohibitions against doing such things.
Republicans should be asking probing questions, but that may be too much to expect of them.
Then there’s the question of how to pay for the work. The original system costs around $600 million so its reasonable to assume that this major re-work effort will cost at least a third of that amount. Perhaps more. Where does all this money suddenly come from?